


The Maggots' Hostages

by kannachan27



Category: Higurashi no Naku Koro ni | Higurashi When They Cry
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Mild Gore, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-31
Updated: 2008-03-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23419516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kannachan27/pseuds/kannachan27
Summary: They were the ones taken captive by the maggots; the maggots lived under their skin, in their blood, in their hearts and bodies and souls. They were the ones the maggots chose to torture, writhing and squirming and never ceasing to move under their skin, until they were tore out by the fingers that had given them life.
Kudos: 1





	The Maggots' Hostages

**Author's Note:**

> This work has been back-dated to March of 2008, because that is when I originally posted it on other sites. This is being uploaded, without changes from the original text, March 31 2020.

He watched and listened as she screamed at him, growled and clawed at her own throat, covered in bandages and reddened skin. About the aliens, about the village. About how she couldn’t trust them anymore, how they had lied to her.

He heard his own sins spoken aloud for the first time and shuddered, wishing that the words she was saying were not true.

His thoughts could not change what was real, however. They could twist and change the reality that he perceived, but they could not alter the truth.

He had lied to her. He had hidden his past. It was unforgivable.

Friends do not keep secrets, after all. He was not her friend.

* * *

He told them, Mion and Rika and Satoko, about his past. He told them about how he would shoot the little girls who had the same model gun as he did, how it was only the small children.

He told them everything, didn’t leave anything out.

When they asked why, he saw Rena’s image in his head, scratching at her throat and saying: “Friends do not keep secrets from each other.”

Mion told him that it was wrong. If that was what he perceived as friendship, she could no longer be his friend.

There were some things that were far too painful to be said aloud.

* * *

She was scratching at it again. Her eyes were wide and crazed, like they were in the other scenario, when she had been trying to kill him. She was breathing regularly, it appeared, as she moved around the room, her weapon never far from her reach.

Her hands never strayed far from her throat, bandaged and violently red, her fingers digging and scratching at the flesh.

He couldn’t look away, even as he spoke to her, promised her that he wasn’t going to betray her. He couldn’t bring his eyes away from the fingertips that were scraping against soft flesh, removing the skin, maggots pouring out of the wound and dropping onto the floor beneath her, a fleshy, squelching noise being made. The maggots squirmed and crawled before blood was even near the open wound, and the maggots blocked it off, dropping to the floor.

Even as he spoke, his eyes watched, unblinkingly, as his best friend, as Rena, proceeded to dig her nails deeper into her own throat, pieces of flesh dropping to the floor, only to be revealed as maggots that crawled out from beneath her skin. He remembered all to vividly the night that he had killed her, beaten her to a bloody pulp with Satoshi’s old baseball bat. He remembered all to vividly the squirming under his skin, the itching, the need for the discomfort to stop.

He could almost imagine the feeling of his skin crawling, the maggots squirming again, underneath his skin. The need to scratch, to get them out of him, to be free from their domination. He clenched his fingers tightly, not allowing himself to give into the imagined--or was it?--sensations.

He wished that she would stop.

She did, for a moment.

Long enough to tell him that, tonight, she would likely claw her own throat out. Her fingers returned to picking at the skin, even as she walked around the room, checking on her classmates-cum-hostages.

Yes. He remembered clawing out his throat. He had been on the phone with Oishi, he had apologized, even as his fingers had been knuckle deep in his own flesh and he had had no choice but to continue the scratching or to remove his fingers. But the squirming had only gotten worse, and the maggots were pouring out of him and onto his shirt and crawling under his skin again.

The maggots that lived in his blood, moving and squirming and crawling, unceasingly.

He was foolish enough to wish for Rena to stop. He was not foolish enough to believe that she would.

* * *

When he came back in the room, after he had convinced Rena to trust him, to let him deliver the scrap books to Oishi, he noticed that her eyes were darker. They were wider and darker and more… insane. More… More lost, than they had been before.

The itching had stopped, at least. But that was because she was busy. She was dumping gasoline around the classroom, just close enough to her hostages for them to cry out and recoil. Satoko stared up at her and shook, soft sounds being ignored by her friend-cum-captor.

From then on, every time Keiichi saw her, she was busy. Her hands were moving, her mind focused on something else. Until Oishi called.

Then her hand promptly returned to the task of clawing out her throat, of removing the maggots that still squirmed underneath her skin.

Yet, her facial expression never changed regarding the maggots. It was almost as if she didn’t realize they were there, knew that they were, but didn’t actively notice them. They were torn out of her body by her own hands, but she just kept going, gouging out more and more of her flesh.

* * *

Keiichi wished that he hadn’t experienced what she was, that he didn’t remember it. He wished that he hadn’t doubted his friends, become suspicious of them. He stared up into Rena’s eyes, fierce with determination yet softening with uncertainty and even tears as she hovered above him, her blade in the air, ready to swing down and end this.

Her arm shook, and she begged him with her eyes, begging him to stop this all. “Is it over?” she asked him, wishing.

It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be over, not until… “When you swing that down,” not until she kills him, puts an end to this game. Only then will it be over. And perhaps it wouldn’t even end then. He had been killed and reborn how many times, now? He lost count.

He saw the red of her neck, raw and scratched and covered even more in bandages than it had been before, and wished that he could unsee it. But she was normal again, she had come back to him. She could be clawing herself to death now, but here she was, atop him, trying desperately to avoid an end where she would kill him.

Then she realized. She realized what she had done, all the things that happened, in every June, every repeating June. He knew because of the change in her eyes when she met his, the tears that fell, the quiver in her voice when she said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

He smiled at her. Called her amazing. “You realized it on your own. You realized your own sins. You’re amazing, Rena!” And she dropped her weapon, finally, sitting back and crying. He told her that she was amazing, praised her, and held her close to him, letting her cry.

They were the ones taken captive by the maggots; the maggots lived under their skin, in their blood, in their hearts and bodies and souls. They were the ones the maggots chose to torture, writhing and squirming and never ceasing to move under their skin, until they were tore out by the fingers that had given them life.

But they had escaped. With something so simple as trusting in one’s friends, they had managed to escape the incessant crawling of the maggots that so occupied their bodies.


End file.
